
It is possible to condemn Islamophobic violence and the violence of Political Islam in the same breath. We don’t have to choose one and simultaneously condemning both does not have to require equating the violence against Political Islam with the systemic violence of Islam. In the present context of Nigeria, North Africa and the Middle East where theocratic regimes and theocratic blasphemy laws continue to thrive, symbolic violence like burning the Quran in protest cannot and should not be equated to the violence of Political Islamists that burns young girls alive for not having sex with them or that burnt Deborah alive in Sokoto for saying something they do not like (blasphemy). You may already see the patriarchal necropolitics of the ideological extremism of Political Islam in the fact that most times women are always the one they punish with death and death threats because that ideology particularly regard women as disposable.
It is therefore wrong to equate hate speech against Islam (sometimes motivating the burning of Qurans) with the beheading of those who do it by agents of Political Islam. It is not equivalent. It is not justified. It is not justice. If someone commits hate speech, you can reply by expressing a love or hate speech in return. It is totally disproportionate to kill another human being for hating you or your religion.
Even if the Islamophobia is motivated by a demagogue like Trump, the solution to imperialist Islamophobia is not killing people because of what they say. If we do that we are still fighting on behalf of imperialism because imperialism (even US imperialism) have constantly propped up patriarchal fascists from different religions (whether Islam or Christianity) as theocratic rulers of different parts of the world so that they can achieve their neocolonial goals. It is part of the divide and conquer game of imperialism to pit group against the other, especially men against women. They do it so that they can use the chaos to justify their framing of the people of Africa and the Middle East as barbaric. Demagogues like Trump drop bombs in the Middle East with the confidence that he can bank on Islamophobia to escape the responsibility that his bombs creates – Muslim asylum seekers from the Middle East. Both the Islamophobic Trump and the agents of political Islam are fascists. Religious extremism and xenophobic nationalism are the two hands of the puppeteer imperialism that hopes to destabilize our countries so that they can keep extracting human and material resources.
I now know better than to burn Qurans, but those who do so in opposition to the direct violence of political Islam in their own context are justified because it is symbolic protest. “Infidels” who do it in protest of the fact that the Quran commands its followers to kill “Infidels” are justified. Those who do it for islamophobic and imperialist reasons are wrong for their performative racism that seeks to use a fake “clash of civilizations” to distract from an ongoing class war led by the likes of Trump and Muhammad Bin Salman, but death should not be the penalty of any speech or symbolic action – whether it is Islamophobic or ‘blasphemous’. The commensurate thing is to reply with your own speech or symbolic actions. It is just a book to the rest of the world, no matter how symbolic the book is to you.
‘A book for a body’ is a far stretch away from ‘an eye for an eye’ and even “an eye for an eye makes the world go blind”